


'til Death

by UrbanAmazon



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, finding closure, letters to the dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 12:28:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17141762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UrbanAmazon/pseuds/UrbanAmazon
Summary: Years after the events at Crimson Peak, Edith returns.  Closure is not always a simple thing, for the living or the dead.





	'til Death

**Author's Note:**

  * For [misslucyjane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslucyjane/gifts).



It was cool and quite damp, even for an evening.  The sunset peeked dark red and gold from behind the clouds to the west, and the wind that caught at Edith’s hat and skirts whispered of the winter soon to come.  Perhaps in the morning, there would be frost on the walkways and all would be limned in ghostly white and silver.  The thought gave Edith a bit of a smile as she walked the familiar route of Bidwell Parkway - white and silver, like one of Alan’s glass photographs.  She hugged her wrapped package closer to her chest, checked her hatpin to make sure it was secure despite the wind’s best efforts, then made her way up the stairs and gave the front door of number 65 a proper knock.

It was a new maid that opened the door for her; she hid her expression of alarm almost well enough to be undetected, then curtsied and hurried down the hall in a pattering of light feet.  

Edith took the moment of solitude in the foyer to remove her hat and breathe in the smell of a well-kept house, free of dust and mildew.  The radiator hissed softly along the wall, with no snap or sizzle of a roaring fireplace. The windows did not rattle and the walls did not groan with the wind.  As secure of a house as Edith had ever known--

The gentle three-beat gait of shoes and a cane approaching broke Edith’s concentration, as did the voice that followed.  “Some might consider it improper, paying a social call to a man on the eve of his wedding.” Alan’s tie was loosened, and his reading glasses tucked into his pocket, but the rest of him was still handsomely wrapped up in his shirt and waistcoat.  The cane, a sturdy length of maple with a softly curved brass hook, was tucked up into the crook of his elbow as Edith turned. “By some, I do mean my mother.  She’s been desperate for proper gossip since Eunice was swept off to California, so really, you’re doing her a kindness.”

“My dear Alan.”  Edith set her parcel on the hallway table and caught Alan’s face between her hands.  “My kindnesses are reserved exclusively for you, and your mother knows it.  You, on the other hand, are _taking_ a social call on the eve of your wedding.  What _will_ people say?”  

There was a lighter hint of white starting in at his eyebrows and on the edges of his neatly trimmed beard.  Alan smiled, and the lines around his eyes were soft and happy things.  The two of them leaned together into a warm embrace.  “I find it particularly difficult to care what people say,” he answered into the pinned waves of her hair, “on account that I might be a little bit terrified.”  

“You’ll be _fine_.”  Edith laughed, which made Alan laugh, and the two of them settled into the living room for a proper visit.  

Marriage held such an odd flavor in Edith’s mind, now.  They’d both faced so many whispers when they’d both returned from across the Atlantic, limping in their own ways.   _Horrible business_ , they’d said, though it was none of theirs.   _Married into a tainted family_ , which hurt, and _ran across the world for a woman already spoken for_ , which was just untrue.  

Strangely, the gossip meant no one minded Edith’s love stories containing ghosts anymore.  The publishers were suddenly clambering over one another to attract a contract.   _Scandal_ _sells_ , they insisted.   _The next Mary Shelley_ , they said.  

Edith, comfortable in the quiet, didn’t mind.  

But Alan--  

Edith had met Thomasina a handful of times - a lovely woman with a skilled hand for illustration, who’d crossed Alan’s path in bringing printed advertisements for reading glasses to his office.  The woman had a boisterous laugh, six brothers back in Virginia, and cheeks that flushed pink whenever Alan glanced fondly in her direction.  For all Edith avoided gossip, she thought the two of them would make a good pair, with Thomasina bringing a much-needed lightness to Alan’s days.  

“It’s not a very imaginative gift,” Edith confessed as Alan folded back the paper.  

The book was bound in bright blue fabric and trimmed in printed gold along the spine.  Alan lifted it wryly and thumbed the gold-edged pages. “You do realize already have a copy of _both_ your books,” he chided, then opened the cover and frowned.  “‘To… writing your own happy ending’,” he read on the inside cover.  “It’s blank?”

“One of us deserves a story where the hero lives happily ever after, Alan.”  

The air in the room sobered.  Alan laid the book upon the side-table, by his cane.  “I take it you’ll be catching the morning train?”

“Yes.  My ship leaves New York City on Friday.”  Edith felt the impulse to touch the scar upon her right cheek, almost faded to nothing in all but one particular angle of light.  She curled her hands into fists.

Alan leaned forward and placed his hand over both of hers.  “I do wish you could be at the wedding, Edith… but I’m not going to lie and say I don’t understand why you won’t be.”

“It’s bad timing, nothing more.  If my solicitor has to write yet another letter, I fear he may quit.”  Edith glanced down at her folded hands, at the faint ridge on the knuckle of her left ring finger that had never quite healed right.  “And… it’s time, Alan. It is something I must do. I’ve sent already sent the last of the mine’s assets off to charities, but--”

“What will you do with Allerdale Hall?”

“To be honest… would you believe I haven’t yet decided?”  Edith gave a short laugh. “I could sell the land wholesale.  I could have the mansion destroyed, brick by brick. I could leave it to rot where it stands, condemned.  I--” Her chest was suddenly tight.  She breathed in quickly through her nose and blinked at the threat of tears.  

“Edith.  You’ll know.  I have faith in you.”  Alan’s voice was soft and and steady.  “Thank you for your gift. You know how well I write, so… perhaps I’ll have to see if you can edit it, once I’ve got some written in?”

She had to smile at that, and the tension was broken.  “Or I could hand it to my editor instead?”

“I _hope_ not!  This is going to be a diary, I don’t want it covered in red ink.”  He relaxed back into his chair and laced his fingers together. “I remember travelling that far by ship.  How will you pass the time?”

“I’ll write, I think.”

 

\--

 

_November 1, 1909_

 

_My dear Thomas --_

_Hello, husband._

_I lit a candle today, and thought of you.  What I mean to say is that I did it deliberately - I lit a single candle in my cabin and allowed myself to remember the way a tiny flame warmed our hands together, dancing that lovely waltz.  I remember the way our eyes beheld nothing but each other, for that precious handful of minutes.  I like to think of that moment as the happiest, most honest time I could have ever known you, when the world was only us, and a single candle._

_It has been some time since I have let myself think of you with any kind of deliberation.  The accidental moments are painful enough.  I cannot run, do you know that? When I breathe too deeply, or when the air is too cold in the wintertime, I cough as if all the blood in my lungs must come loose.  I cannot stand the taste of tea anymore, for it is either too bitter, or I cannot trust what the sweetness might be hiding.  Alan walks with a cane, for while he claims you intended him to live, his wounds were still deep and he nearly bled to death._

_We survived, but nothing ever truly heals completely._

_There is a part of me, a dark and terrible part, that still knows malice.  You took so much from me.  You lied, upon the very oath we swore in marriage.  Thanks to actions by your hand, I know such a picture of cruelty that I can never in good conscience ever fully commit to paper for another soul to know, no matter how my editor might coax me.  For many, many months, I could not bear to recall the sound of your voice or the shape of your face - it was too delicate a line to walk, as if to remember too much would be a weight to send me into a void of such anguish that I could not breathe.  So, with care, I taught myself not to think of you at all.  Like the scar upon my cheek, you would fade into weightlessness.  I would not forget you, just as I’d always promised… but we would part.  You are dead, so I would let you die and fade to nothing._

_But then I realized… that is what Lucille did.  To Pamela.  To Margaret.  To Enola. That is what she would have done to me.  In her eyes, it is what you were supposed to do.  And you did not._

_I was wrong, I know this now.  People are not scars, no matter how we might leave them in our wake.  We must accept the weight of what is done and what we do, and continue on, else we become ghosts among the living; a curse as real and as terrible as the spirits that linger after death._

_Ghosts, at least, are aware of their own suffering, and that which they cause._

_Once upon a time, you told me that where you came from, ghosts were not a thing to take lightly.  I don’t think you nor I realized, then, how you spoke both truth and falsehood in the same breath.  Perhaps this is why I write to you, as if you were still alive and might hear me, as I once felt your cheek beneath my hand, and then nothing.  Perhaps this is what I must do, to accept this weight you have left to me, so you may be free of it._

_As husband and wife, we swore ‘til death do us part.  But have we? I don’t think we ever will.  Whatever power you yet hold over me, husband, I allow it.  I will look at this candle, and if I smile, then I smile… and if, on another day I weep, I will do that, too.  You were real.  All of you was real._

_I think I understand, now.  I understand what it is like to be parted from one you loved, trusted, knew intimately, and to feel they betrayed everything you had given.  I will never forgive Lucille for what she did, I will not forgive you… but I understand._

_Rest._

_I remain,_

_Your Edith_

 

\--

 

It snowed when she arrived in Cumberland.  The land and the sky turned white, seamless as a dream.

Mister Finlay took off his flat cap as she stepped from the car.  Though his deeply-carved face had not aged at all since she’d first met him, his hair was wholly white now, as was his wiry beard.  “Terrible fright we had, Lady Sharpe. Right at dawn, we heard this terrible roaring, and shook the ground all the way to town. We had a thoroughly wet autumn, saturated everything, and every day for a month I thought it would collapse, but it hung on like a dog on a bone it did.  ‘Til this morning.” He wrung his hat nervously. “We thought… well, we thought you should need to see it yourself to believe it.”

Allerdale Hall was gone.  That grand, wounded beast of a structure, with the walls that breathed with the wind and holes flayed into the roof to show its rotted bones, with the great doors that creaked at even the slightest touch and the mildew creeping into its stones like dreadful memories… it was all _gone_ , leaving only the great wrought-iron archway as any sign a house had ever stood there.  In its place was only snow over the perfectly flat plain, and a great red stain of blood-red clay.  

Finlay hovered agitatedly at her side as she took a step toward the mansion’s grave.  “Lady Sharpe! It’s unstable out there. Must have been a sinkhole, or the mines caved in.  Do be careful!”

There was not a bit of fear in Edith.  She touched the old man’s shoulder gently.  “I’ll be fine, Finlay. Thank you.”

Edith walked slowly to the very edge of the great crimson swathe upon the land.  From her coat pocket she drew her sealed letter. If she looked down at it, all she could see in focus was the way she’d written Thomas’ name on the front, all loops and proper curls on crisp white paper, with the haze of the red field beyond.

A sudden wind surged up - the low moan sighed over the plain like a voice, thin and sharp as a blade.  It tugged possessively at the paper, as if to rip it from Edith’s hand and fling it as far as it could be carried.  Edith held it fast. Slowly, deliberately, she crouched and set her letter into the clay.  A second breeze, softer but still cold as death, curled against Edith’s cheek.   

Slowly, the red soaked its way into the paper - first in spots, then in hungry splotches that consumed the delicate writing, then pulling the delicate thing down with its weight.  

Edith smiled, and turned, and walked away alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas, fellow Yuletider! I've always had such a fondness for this movie, for Edith's resilience in the face of terror, for Alan's unwavering steadfastness, and for Thomas' damaged soul (not to mention the lushness of absolutely everything). I like to think that both Edith and Alan found happiness on their own terms afterward, and I hope I was able to deliver a slightly fluffy little wintertime story that could make you smile.


End file.
